Atari announced in June that it was getting back into the hardware business, with plans for an upcoming “Ataribox” console. Of course, it didn’t release any actual details at the time—only a slick-looking render of a retro-styled box, complete with real wood paneling. Oh, plus a promise to crowdfund the upcoming console.

If alarm bells just started ringing in your head, visions of another Ouya-style disaster, well I can’t say those fears are unfounded. This week Atari further detailed the Ataribox to GamesBeat, and the plan seems even weirder than before.

If you’ve been hunting for a budget 4K monitor with FreeSync, today’s your lucky day—so long as you don’t mind a TN panel. This week, Newegg is offering AOC’s U2879VF 28-inch 3840x2160 monitor for $260 with coupon code EMCRKCG32. The deal ends on Monday, October 2.

This is a great option for AMD fans since it uses AMD’s FreeSync technology. If you have a compatible AMD Radeon graphics card, FreeSync will reduce tearing and stuttering, giving you a better gaming experience.

Microsoft would really like you to sign up for one of its productivity subscriptions: Office 365, or better yet, the new Microsoft 365. But for those old fogies who prefer standalone software, Microsoft announced Office 2019 on Tuesday.

Office 2019 will ship in the second half of 2018, Microsoft said, with a preview version scheduled for mid-2018. The Office 2019 suite will include the standard complement of Office apps: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, plus server apps like Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business. Presumably, Microsoft will offer different versions of Office 2019 (including a version for the Apple Mac), but executives didn’t say.

Windows 10 S is no longer just for education. On Monday at its Ignite conference for corporate partners, Microsoft unveiled four new Windows 10 S laptops from Acer, HP, and Lenovo, together with a new shorthand for the services they'll provide: Microsoft 365.

The new Windows 10 S machines will be sold to such customers later this year, and all cost less than $350. They're part of the cadre of low-cost Windows 10 S devices that Microsoft showed off at the introduction of Windows 10 S last year. Contrary to that event's educational bent, however, these machines are being positioned as business PCs for what Microsoft terms "firstline workers" but might better be known as "front-line" workers—the staff you meet on support lines or at service counters, who interface with the public.

Did you miss the window for preordering Nintendo’s hot new SNES Classic? Or are you just more partial to emulation? Either way you should join us on our adventure to build our own RetroPie emulation console, using a Raspberry Pi 3! Tune into PCWorld’s YouTube channel on Friday, September 29th at 10 am PT and join us as we go through the entire process.

Intel is reportedly preparing to fabricate “Loihi,” a self-learning “brain chip” that mimics how the human intellect functions, as a foundation for further developments in artificial intelligence.

Named after an active undersea volcano south of the island of Hawaii, Intel said in a statement Monday that Loihi includes a total of 130,000 silicon “neurons” connected with 130 million “synapses,” the junctions that in humans connect the neurons within the brain. The Loihi chip, which Wiredreported will be manufactured next month on Intel’s 14-nm process technology, will be shared with leading universities and research institutions next year in a bid to advance AI development, Intel said.

Microsoft executives said Monday that the company is developing a quantum computer—from chips all the way through to the operating system—in a bid to control what could be a disruptive computer technology.

Though Microsoft is following companies like IBM and D-Wave Systems—whose 2000Q quantum computer is already built and selling to customers like Los Alamos National Laboratory and Google, among others—Microsoft hopes to be able to develop chips around what it calls topological qubits, a more stable form of the quantum bit. Topological qubits would make them more resilient under everyday use, the company says.

“Kill the warmbloods!” The cry resounds over the battlefield, no doubt instilling fear in the hordes of rats who face me. Still they march on, pouring out of desolate ruins towards my scaly soldiers. To the left, a division of spear-wielding chameleons. To the right, a massive tyrannosaurus rex waits with opening jaws. And behind? Well, that’s where my cavalry await—dinosaurs riding other dinosaurs.

Total War: Warhammer II is truly bizarre.

Skaven is a place on Earth

It’s been approximately a year and a half since the release of Total War: Warhammer—the first Total War game to abandon history for more fantastical fields of glory. Do I wish we’d gotten another history-centric Total War by now? Sure. But we didn’t, and instead Creative Assembly has released the second part of a planned trilogy, which for convenience sake I’m going to call Total Warhammer II from here on out.

Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Tablet (2017) does little to differentiate itself from the company’s first-generation X1 Tablet, and we’re generally okay with that. Lenovo kept what we liked most—the comfy kickstand, fingerprint reader, and modular accessories—but upgraded the new 12-inch ThinkPad X1 Tablet with an Intel Kaby Lake chip to bring it in line with the competition.

The ThinkPad brand is equated with no-nonsense business machines, and the X1 Tablet offers a host of useful checkbox items like front and rear cameras, an SD card slot, and the traditional TrackPoint nubbin, which should appeal to ThinkPad fans. But those features might not be enough to silence the call of emerging, stylish rivals like the Samsung Galaxy Book, which offers better battery life, and at a lower price. Let’s be clear: The new X1 Tablet is a competent two-in-one. But the competition has improved, and for that reason we’re knocking the second-generation X1 Tablet’s score down a half-star from its predecessor.

Intel. Strikes. Back. The massive 18-core Core i9-7980X and 16-core Core i8-7960X are the chipmaker’s response to AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper, which has been eating Intel’s lunch for many months.

But can Goliath Intel rise from its stunning defeat to challenge David AMD to a re-match? Can it shake off rumors of clock speeds and high temperatures? To find out you’ll have to read on.

Because there’s so much to say about Core i9, we put the prices, features and FAQs into a separate story you’ll want to read for background. For this review, we’ll walk through some of the under-the-hood issues directly related to performance, and then we’ll dive into the benchmarks.

Intel pushed further ahead into its 8th-generation Core series with the launch of its mainstream desktop chips Sunday night, including the 6-core/12-thread Core i7-8700K, which Intel claims is its best gaming chip ever. Intel also beefed up its Core i5 family with 6-core parts, as well as its first quad-core Core i3.

Orders for Intel’s new Core desktop chips will begin on October 5, Anand Srivatsa, general manager of the desktop platform group at Intel, said. They will begin shipping later in the fourth quarter.

Prices and specs for the new 8th-gen Core chips

Though executives didn’t use the term, the new chips have been referred to as part of the “Coffee Lake” family. In all, Intel launched six new chips:

On Thursday, AMD released Radeon Software 17.9.2, a driver that unlocks 2-way multi-GPU support in the company’s newly released Radeon RX Vega graphics cards. Great! But also weird. Previous Radeon generations supported up to 4-way CrossFire configurations. No more. In response to a PCWorld follow-up question, AMD confirmed that RX Vega will top out at 2-way configurations—at least in games.

We live and work in a cold, cruel world where our laptops can take a lot of abuse. Regardless of how gentle we try to be, our notebooks will probably be dropped, spilled upon or worse—sooner, if not later.

But if you think that all notebook damage can be repaired only by the manufacturer or a computer shop, think again. Many problems can be inexpensively and easily fixed with common tools, spare parts, and a little effort. Some repairs are no harder than high school art projects. That said, there are modern laptops that are very difficult to open and repair. If you can't see any screws, you're in for a tough time.

Using a couple of old, beat-up mainstream notebooks, we’ll show you how to fix everything from a broken case and frayed charger cord to a bad fan and scratched screen. Each restoration project has time and cost estimates, as well as what materials you’ll need to do the trick. Just follow the basic directions we’ve outlined for each repair.

Intel has decided to halt development on its Project Alloy standalone VR headset, executives said, as a standalone headset proved to be no match for PC-powered VR.

In August 2016, Intel launched Project Alloy in conjunction with Microsoft, as one of the first instances of making the technology behind virtual reality into an open-source platform, sort of like the PC. But Intel decided not to go forward with the project for two reasons, according to Kim Pallister, the director of the Virtual Reality Center of Excellence at Intel: lack of customer interest, and a discovery that a self-contained headset just didn’t offer the performance of a PC that could be plugged into a wall.

When AMD released the Radeon Software 17.9.2 drivers that enabled support for multi-GPU solutions in Radeon RX Vega cards this morning, the announcement post didn’t mention CrossFire—AMD’s longstanding brand for multi-GPU (mGPU) solutions—a single time. An AMD representative revealed why in response to a PCWorld query: In this complicated mGPU age, Radeon is abandoning the CrossFire brand.

The solar panel is an alternative way to power the Ring Stick Up Cam. Without the panel, you have to bring it in every few months to charge it via USB. When we reviewed the Stick Up Cam earlier in September, we liked it as a way to expand the security perimeter of anyone who's already using the Ring Video Doorbell. (Though we did find that as a standalone security camera, there were better options.)

More. Free. Games.

Humble’s End of Summer Sale is officially over—but not really. And that means another free game for your library, as the sale enters its “encore” phase. This time it’s Outlast—one of the best PC horror games ever—plus the fantastic Whistleblower DLC. You can snag a copy until 10 a.m. Pacific on Saturday, so jump on it if you’re a horror fan.

It’s not quite as full-featured as long-time Radeon buyers may to used to, though. Taking a page out of Nvidia’s GTX 10-series playbook, Radeon RX Vega’s multi-GPU capabilities are limited to two graphics cards alone, rather than the 4-way CrossFire support that premium Radeon cards traditionally offered. And curiously, CrossFire isn’t mentioned by name in AMD’s announcement post; it’s referred to solely as “multi-GPU (mGPU).” We’ve asked AMD about those oddities and will update this post if we hear back.

You know that old saying, “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have”? The same can be said of product branding. Maybe, if you think there’s even an infinitesimally small chance you might branch out of your core product focus in the future, don’t pick a name like “Sound Blaster” that really only applies to...well, audio components.

Which is to say: Creative makes a mouse now, and for some reason decided to call it the Sound BlasterX Siege M04. Yes, a Sound Blaster mouse.

The other surprise? Aside from the name, it’s pretty damn good.

Design: X marks the spot

In fact, considering that the Siege M04 (available for $80 on Amazon) is the first Sound Blaster mouse, it’s shockingly bold. By comparison, the Pulsefire is HyperX’s first mouse and it’s more or less a clone of the evergreen Razer DeathAdder.

The HTC Vive and Oculus Rift are already here, but the battle for the best PC virtual reality headset will get more complicated on October 17, when Microsoft and its partners launch Windows Mixed Reality headsets as part of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.